Heidegger on the Nonsense of Objects:

A Historical Backdrop to a Textual Ambiguity

Raoni Padui

ABSTRACT: Heidegger’s position regarding the independent existence of entities has been
a matter of considerable controversy. On the one hand he appears to defend something
resembling transcendental or Kantian idealism without the notion of a thing in itself. On the
other he upholds the independent existence of entities in their ontic dimension. The resultant
interpretive controversy primarily pertains to how one can make the Dasein-dependence
of being cohere with the Dasein-independence of entities. In this paper I argue that this
philosophical difficulty arises from a textual ambiguity in the notion of Vorhandensein,
which is used to designate two different senses of objectivity: one of the innerworldly
existence of objectified entities and another regarding their bare existence independent
of their worldliness. After tracing the historical context for this ambiguity, I argue that
Heidegger believes that entities unlike Dasein are inherently bare of meaning or nonsensi-
cal in themselves.

T HERE HAS BEEN considerable debate regarding whether, and to what extent,

Martin Heidegger should be considered a realist or a transcendental idealist.
If commentators can agree on anything, it is that his position is at times difficult to
determine; for some he borders on incoherence. On the one hand, Heidegger makes
claims that put him squarely within the tradition of transcendental idealism or of
anti-realism more generally. His claims suggest that being itself is dependent on the
mode of meaningful encounter that is in turn dependent on Dasein. Here are some
of the loci classici for such anti-realist readings:

The real is essentially accessible only as innerworldly beings. Every access to such beings
is ontologically based on the fundamental constitution of Dasein, on Being-in-the-world.1

Beings are discovered only when Dasein is, and only as long as Dasein is are they dis-
closed. Newton’s laws, the law of contradiction, and any truth whatsoever, are true only
as long as Dasein is.2

But Heidegger simultaneously denies that this dependence cuts across the ontologi-
cal difference between being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende). Rather, he claims
that the Dasein-dependence of being is consistent with the independent existence
of beings. The seemingly idealist and anti-realist claims cited above are therefore

1
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 188;
Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), p. 202. Hereafter cited as BT and SZ respectively.
2
BT 208; SZ 226.

International Philosophical Quarterly  Vol. 55, No. 4, Issue 220 (December 2015) pp. 495–514
doi: 10.5840/ipq201510647
496 RAONI PADUI

tempered, if not altogether undermined, by an affirmation of the unequivocal Dasein-

independence of the ontic dimension:

The fact that reality is ontologically grounded in the being of Dasein cannot mean that
something real can only be what it is in itself [was es an ihm selbst ist] when and as long
as Dasein exists.3

The fact that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false cannot mean that the
beings which they point out in a discovering way did not previously exist.4

Commentators are divided as to how one ought to understand that entities can be or
exist independent of Dasein, since what it means to be or to exist is itself dependent
on Dasein. One way of making these seemingly contradictory positions consistent
with one another is by reading Heidegger as a transcendental idealist in the footsteps
of Kant and Husserl.5
The transcendental reading makes the above claims coherent by interpreting the
ontological difference between being and beings to mean something analogous
to the distinction between a transcendental and an empirical level in the Kantian
project, or between the properly phenomenological correlative content and the
natural attitude in Husserlian phenomenology. The effect of these readings is that
the second type of claim, whereby Heidegger accepts the independent existence
of entities outside of their worldly meaningful existence, is grounded in the first,
which insists on the necessity of Dasein for world-disclosure. On this reading,
Dasein is the necessary condition of possibility for anything to be meaningful or
to make sense, including the independence of entities from any space of mean-
ing. Dasein replaces the transcendental unity of apperception as a sine qua non
of all experience, becoming that upon which objectivity, objective existence, and
independence are grounded. In this paper I will attempt to show the limits of these
strictly transcendental readings through an investigation of the status of the being

3
BT 196; SZ 212.
4
BT 208; SZ 227.
5
For readings of the early Heidegger that tend to interpret his work in broadly idealist lines, see William
Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999); William Blattner,
“Heidegger’s Kantian Idealism Revisited,” Inquiry 47 (2004): 321–37; Lee Braver, A Thing of this World: A
History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2007); Piotr Hoffman, “Hei-
degger and the Problem of Idealism,” Inquiry 43 (2000): 403–12; Béatrice Han-Pile, “Early Heidegger’s
Appropriation of Kant” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden
MA: Blackwell, 2005); and Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston IL:
Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001). Several important essays on this issue have recently been collected in
Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007).
For critiques of these positions, and interpretations that tend to pull Heidegger’s philosophy in a broadly
realist direction, see David Cerbone, “World, World-Entry, and Realism in the Early Heidegger,” Inquiry
38 (1995): 401–42; Taylor Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in
Being and Time (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 155–203; Hubert Dreyfus and Charles
Spinoza, “Coping with Things-in-themselves: A Practice-Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism,”
Inquiry 42 (1999): 49–78; Herman Philipse, “Heidegger’s ‘Scandal of Philosophy:’ The Problem of the ‘Ding
and Sich’ in Being and Time” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford
CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007).
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 497

of objects (Vorhandenheit) in Heidegger’s early philosophy. In the first two parts of

the paper I will show how Heidegger’s position is not compatible with the strictly
Kantian interpretation since Heidegger does not subordinate the existence of the
ontic to its mode of access. In transcendental terms, Heidegger does not subordinate
the question of empirical reality of objects to the question of objective validity of
claims about their independence. Rather, he paradoxically maintains that objects
can exist “within” the world and thus be meaningful empirical objects, but also
that this meaning is not inherent in the type of entities that they are. Thus they are
non-worldly, nonsensical in their very being. In part three and four of the paper I
show how this seemingly strange notion of objectivity without objective validity
arises from a historical ambiguity regarding the concept of objectivity, an ambi-
guity that Heidegger could have inherited from his early education in Southwest
Neo-Kantianism.

HEIDEGGER AND TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

On the transcendental reading, the questions of truth and validity become precondi-
tions for any subsequent talk of reality or independence, a position that can be traced
back to Kant’s notion of objective validity. As is well known, for Kant objectivity
does not mean independence from the subject, but rather that the conditions supplied
by transcendental subjectivity apply to all objects of experience with necessity and
universality, and therefore have validity (Geltung). The deduction is supposed to
defend this universal applicability, culminating in the following claim: “We then
assert that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise con-
ditions of the possibility of the objects of experience, and that for this reason   they
have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgment.”6 Objective validity is here
a normative concept. While Kant is not always consistent in making the distinction
between Objekt and Gegenstand,7 he mostly uses the former to denote the normative
sense of what holds validity because it is universal and necessary. Henry Allison, for
example, uses this distinction as the basis for differentiating between the problems
of objective validity and objective reality in Kant’s idealism.8 Objectivity therefore
has the sense of a law, supplied by transcendental subjectivity, that is universally
applied by all subjects to every object of experience:

The objective validity [objektive Gültigkeit] of the categories as a priori concepts rests,
therefore, on the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone
does experience become possible. They relate of necessity and a priori to objects of
experience [Gegenstände der Erfahrung], for the reason that only by means of them can
any object whatsoever of experience be thought.9

6
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York NY: St. Martin’s
Press, 1965), 194; KrV A 158/B 197.
7
Cf. Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1974), pp. 98–147.
8
Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven CT:
Yale Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 134–35.
9
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 126; KrV A 93/B 126.
498 RAONI PADUI

Since universal laws are ultimately grounded in transcendental unity of appercep-

tion, the notion that objectivity can be found outside of the realm of subjectivity
is anathema to transcendental idealism. Despite the obvious and vast differences
between Kant’s and Husserl’s versions of idealism, transcendental subjectivity as a
condition for any notion of objectivity is preserved in Husserlian phenomenology.
As he maintains in his critique of psychologism, objectivity can only be found or
properly grounded from within the realm of consciousness:

It is in the methodical disposition and connection of experiences, in the interplay of experi-

ence and thought, which has its rigid logical laws, that valid experience is distinguished
from invalid, that each experience is accorded a level of validity, and that objectively
valid knowledge as such, knowledge of nature, is worked out.10

In many ways, Husserl goes further than Kant by denying even the negative notion
of a noumenon or of things-in-themselves. If properly understood from within the
phenomenological reduction, any sense of existence beyond the sphere of possible
consciousness becomes, strictly speaking, nonsensical:

Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent
or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectiv-
ity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being
as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge,
possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law,
is nonsensical.11

If Heidegger were to follow this Kantian and Husserlian trajectory into transcen-
dental idealism broadly construed, then to speak about entities existing without
Dasein, and thus outside of the space of meaningful experience, would be to speak
about that which has no sense. Heidegger’s insistence on the Dasein-independence
of entities is either inconsistent with strict phenomenological restrictions, or it must
be made consistent. Some commentators have chosen the second path. As a model
one may take the two-tiered approach of transcendental philosophy, in which the
ontological conditions are transcendentally ideal and yet what they condition (the
ontic level) remain empirically real.12
In Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, William Blattner interprets Heidegger’s
position by regarding the ontic and the ontological levels as analogous to the dis-
tinction between the empirical and the transcendental. The objective independence

10
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy,
trans. Quentin Lauer (New York NY: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 87.
11
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 84.
12
On the transcendental ideality and empirical reality of space and time, see respectively Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason, 72; KrV A28/B44 and Critique of Pure Reason, 78; KrV A36/B52. Note how Kant glosses
the notion of empirical reality by recourse to its objective validity, that is, a priori applicability to all objects
of experience: “What we are maintaining is, therefore, the empirical reality of time, that is, its objective
validity in respect of all objects which allow of ever being given to our senses.”
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 499

of entities is a statement Heidegger makes from a standpoint other than a strictly

phenomenological one. The independence of entities in Heidegger becomes some-
thing similar to immanent transcendences in Husserl. It is certainly the case that we
engage with objective entities that are independent of our thoughts and practices,
but there can be no sense, external to that phenomenal realm, in which they are
actually independent:

That is, the occurrent is precisely what does not depend upon Dasein or its practices. The
“does not depend” must clearly be spoken from the empirical standpoint, although the
analysis that results in this cashing-out of occurrentness proceeds from the phenomeno-
logical standpoint. After all, from the transcendental standpoint, we discover that without
Dasein there would “be” no being, and hence no occurrentness, and that therefore there
would neither be nor not be occurrent entities.13

Lee Braver also accepts this broadly anti-realist position and explains it in terms
of the everyday naïve realism in which we take entities to exist independent of our
access to these entities. Once we inquire into the proper grounding of these naïve
claims about entities then we begin to think phenomenologically:

This is now Heidegger the philosopher talking about average everyday Dasein’s ontically
realist experience of the world. In other words, part of the way objects appear to us is as
not dependent on appearing to us. That does not mean that they really are independent of
their manifestation, just that they manifest themselves as independent of all manifestation.14

Heidegger thus moves between different modes of discourse—between our every-

day talk of object independence, what on Blattner’s reading would be an empirical
standpoint, and a strict philosophical level in which one notices that being itself,
and thus the being of entities, is Dasein-dependent. While this reading does have
the important virtue of making Heidegger’s position more consistent than what
is initially suggested by the texts themselves, it does so at the expense of making
Heidegger’s ontic realism dependent on and subservient to his ontological idealism.
As Braver explicitly puts it: “However, this Dasein-independence itself is dependent
on Dasein since it is a meaning which can only manifest itself within a clearing.”15
This makes the very being of entities unlike Dasein indirectly dependent on Dasein,
albeit through the intermediate level of their meaningful manifestation.16
Although this strategy for approximating Heidegger’s position to its lineage
within transcendental idealism may give his position the virtue of consistency, other
commentators have noted the ways in which it seems to contradict several explicit

13
William D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999),
p. 251.
14
Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston IL: Northwestern
Univ. Press, 2007), p. 193.
15
Braver, A Thing of this World, p. 194.
16
If one defends this reading, then it makes Heidegger susceptible to the critique of “correlationism”
found in Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(New York NY: Continuum, 2008).
500 RAONI PADUI

claims in Heidegger’s texts.17 There are many passages in which Heidegger denies
that entities depend on Dasein or on the sphere of meaningful experience. Here are
but two of these moments:

As we have noted, being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being, that
is, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care.18

Beings are independently of the experience, cognition, and comprehension through which
they are disclosed, discovered, and determined.19

Although it should be maintained, with Blattner and Braver, that Heidegger in fact
does make a distinction between two levels of inquiry and that the ontological and
the ontic are operating in a manner that is analogous to the distinction between a
transcendental and an empirical level, it is important to note that the levels do not
have an asymmetrical dependence-relation that renders any mode of being in some
way indirectly grounded upon Dasein. In other words, Dasein is neither a sufficient,
nor a necessary condition for the existence of entities. This is because the distinction
between the ontological and the ontic runs deeper than the distinction between the
transcendental and the empirical since it implies that entities can exist independently
of their meaningful existence within a world.

ON THE VERY IDEA OF VORHANDENSEIN

The issues regarding Heidegger’s realism or anti-realism about entities cannot be

settled immanently by recourse to his texts. The reason for this, I want to argue, is
that the notion of the Vorhanden wavers ambiguously between two different senses.
Heidegger’s concept of Vorhandenheit (translated as presence-at-hand, objective
presence, or simply as the extant or occurrent20) is the concept most suited for
understanding the mode of being of entities that we generally consider as objects
or as objective. The notion is utilized by Heidegger as a contrast to our practical
everyday engagement with entities. But, as commentators have noticed for quite
some time, Vorhanden is used in several distinct senses throughout Being and
Time and the surrounding seminars in the twenties.21 I will argue that at the heart
of these diverse senses of the Vorhanden there is an important ambiguity in regard

17
Cf. David Cerbone, “World, World-Entry, and Realism in the Early Heidegger,” Inquiry 38 (1995):
401–42; Taylor Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and
Time (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 155–203; and Philipse, “Heidegger’s ‘Scandal
of Philosophy.’”
18
BT 196; SZ 212.
19
BT 172; SZ 183.
20
Since I will be working with texts using different translations of the term Vorhandenheit, I will constantly
refer to the German in order to avoid confusion.
21
Cf. Joseph P. Fell, “The Familiar and the Strange: On the Limits of Praxis in the Early Heidegger,” The
Southern Journal of Philosophy 28 (1989): 23–41. Fell finds at least four distinct senses of the present-at-
hand in Heidegger’s Being and Time alone.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 501

to its innerworldliness or intraworldliness (Innerweltlichkeit).22 Heidegger seems

to vacillate between Vorhandensein as the innerworldly being of entities objecti-
fied by a theoretical and representational intentional relation and Vorhandensein
as an undifferentiated and non-categorical determination of entities prior to or
independent of their contact with Dasein. In other words, the concept will at times
be used to refer to our grasp of entities under a theoretical mode of comportment
(objectivity), and at other times to the entities independent of such comportment
(what we traditionally call objects). I will argue that these two distinct senses of the
Vorhanden make Heidegger’s position highly unstable and textually undecidable,
for it wavers between a direct realism about nature and a transcendental idealism
about our access to entities.
The traditional story about the relationship between the Zuhanden and the
Vorhanden involves the now familiar shift from our original and practical engage-
ment with worldly entities to a modification of that relationship into a theoretical
or epistemological grasp of objects. According to Being and Time, Dasein moves
about the world circumspectively and understandingly. It takes care of beings in
such a way that the prior familiarity with them is implicitly presupposed. This let-
ting beings be encountered as the beings that they are involves what Heidegger calls
a “totality of relevance [Bewandtnisganzheit].”23 When we engage with entities in
the world, we already see them “as” something or other, and as useful “for” certain
practical purposes and engagements. This seeing-as involves a “context of relations
[Bezugszusammenhangs]”24 that constitutes the world of Dasein. The mode of being
of such innerworldly beings is what Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit—handiness or
readiness-to-hand. It is only in the breakdown of this concernful engagement that
the entity can show itself as an object to be investigated theoretically. In a polemi-
cal reversal of Kant’s Ding an sich, Heidegger claims that it is Zuhandenheit that
constitutes the being-in-itself of entities. The mode in which the theoretical attitude
relates to objects is founded and derivative: “Handiness is the ontological categorial
definition of beings as they are ‘in themselves’ [an sich].”25 Our absorption in and
by the world is primary, and as the famous example of the hammer in the workshop
illustrates, it is only when relevance has broken down that the Vorhandenheit of
beings can be made explicit as such.26 Only after putting out-of-play this practical
engagement can we theoretically see entities as objects of knowledge.
Heidegger famously argues that knowing or cognitively grasping the world is a
“founded [fundierten] mode”27 of being-in-the-world and derivative of our circum-
spective concern. The objective presence of entities and their objectification for the
purposes of investigation is subsequent to some initial breakdown of familiarity:

22
I have attempted to remain consistent in using “innerworldliness” rather than “intraworldliness” for
Innerweltlichkeit. In order to do so, I have amended the translations of the seminars that designate inner-
weltlich by “intraworldly.”
23
BT 80; SZ 85.
24
BT 80; SZ 86.
25
BT 67; SZ 71.
26
BT 71; SZ 76.
27
BT 56; SZ 59.
502 RAONI PADUI

Being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein], as taking care of things, is taken in by the world

which it takes care of. In order for knowing to be possible as determining by observation
what is objectively present [Vorhandenen], there must first be a deficiency [Defizienz] of
having to do with the world and taking care of it.28

Heidegger’s phenomenology resists a picture of reality in which entities first exist

as objects and subsequently have value or interpretation projected or imposed on
them to become Zuhanden: “as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were
‘subjectively colored’ in this way.”29 In fact, their objectivity is the product of a
process that originates out of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, in effect reversing the
familiar priority of traditional ontology and the natural sciences: “To expose what
is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand
being taken care of.”30 This may happen in an everyday breakdown of signification,
in which the handiness of an object is transformed by the mere “looking-at” of the
theoretical gaze, or it can happen more systematically through the thematization of a
region of beings by a natural science. The delimitation of a region of entities, whether
living beings (biology), chemical beings (chemistry), or physical beings (physics),
for investigation involves a prior projection or thematization.31 The transformation
of beings into objectively present entities to be investigated theoretically is, for
Heidegger, grounded in the transcendence of Dasein and its being-in-the-world: “If
the thematization of what is objectively present—the scientific project of nature—is
to become possible, Dasein must transcend the beings thematized. Transcendence
does not consist in objectivization, but is rather presupposed by it.”32 Under this
traditional interpretation, the meaning of that which is objectively present is clear: it
is a relationship that Dasein has to entities that is resultant from a kind of transfor-
mation from the Zuhanden, involving a process of objectification and thematization.
This implies that the Vorhanden is in a significant way grounded on or dependent
upon Dasein, the meaningful context of the world, and our understanding of being.
Although this interpretation makes it appear as if Vorhandensein were a categorical
determination of innerworldly entities, things are not so simple. One of the particular
characteristics of the theoretical and epistemological attitude Heidegger describes
is that it involves an unworlding or deworlding (Entweltlichung) of entities:

One tries to interpret the world in terms of the being of the being [dem Sein des Seienden]
which is objectively present within the world [innerweltlich vorhanden] but has not,
however, even been initially discovered—in terms nature. Ontologically and categorially
understood, nature is the boundary case of the being of possible innerworldly beings.
Dasein can discover beings as nature only in a definite mode of its being-in-the-world.
This kind of knowledge has the character of a certain “de-worlding” of the world.33

28
BT 57; SZ 61.
29
BT 67; SZ 71.
30
BT 67; SZ 71.
31
BT 332, SZ 363.
32
BT 332; SZ 363.
33
BT 61; SZ 65.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 503

What does Heidegger mean by this de-worlding activity of Dasein and by the claim
that nature is a boundary of the world? A natural scientist treats entities as if they were
objectively present and independent of the worldliness that makes them meaningful
and gives them intelligibility. She treats entities as bare of meaning as such, which is
a result of “the process of a characteristic unworlding [Entweltlichung].”34 But does
unworlding mean that entities are within the world but divested of their worldliness,
or does it rather suggests that they pre-exist entry and exit into their meaningful
horizon? The former is implied by the fact that Vorhandensein is a mode of being
of innerworldly entities, but the latter is suggested by the fact that Vorhandensein
is used by Heidegger to designate the being of entities irrespective of whether they
are or are not in the world, or in the unworlded character.
What we find in the texts and seminars surrounding Being and Time (especially
from 1925 to 1929) is a terminological oscillation between objective presence
and the being of entities irrespective of their categorical determination. At times
Heidegger thinks of Vorhandenheit as the result of a process of unworlding, and in
this sense it is posterior to and dependent on a transformation within the worldly
context of significance.35 But, as Heidegger himself insists, one should separate
the process that objectifies an entity from the being of that entity: “Objectification
[Vergegenständlichung] means turning something into an object. Only that which
already is in advance can become an object.”36 He repeatedly claims that nature ex-
ists in ways that outstrip and go beyond the categorical determinations we give it,
and that it has independent reality: “Physical nature can only occur as innerworldly
when world, i.e., Dasein, exists. This is not to say that nature cannot be in its own
way [in ihrer eigenen Weise sein], without occurring within a world, without the
existence of a human Dasein and thus without world.”37 But this leads to his other
way of using Vorhandenheit, not simply as a product of the process of unworlding,
but as a designation of the entity that is without world, independent of world.
In the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger uses
the notion of nature to exemplify the innerworldliness of the objectively present:
“An example of an innerworldly entity is nature [Innerweltlich Seiendes ist z. B. die
Natur].”38 But he immediately adds a complication by claiming that “innerworldliness

34
Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington
IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), p. 219 ; Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe, Bd.
20 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1979), p. 301. Hereafter cited as HCT/PGZ.
35
In Being and Time, Heidegger describes unworlding as the process of depriving entities of their Zu-
handen character and transforming them to objectively present determinations: “what is at hand becomes
deprived of its worldliness so that it appears as something merely objectively present. [eine Entweltlichung
des Zuhandenen zusammengeht, so daß an ihm das Nur-vorhandensein zum Vorschein kommt.]” Heidegger,
BT 70; SZ 75.
36
Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis
Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997), p. 19; Phänomenologische Inter-
pretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 25 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann,
1977), p. 27. Hereafter cited as PIK / PIKK respectively.
37
PIK 14; PIKK 19.
38
Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington IN: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1982), p. 168; Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 24 (Frankfurt-
504 RAONI PADUI

does not belong to nature’s being.”39 Throughout Heidegger’s analysis it becomes

difficult to delineate that to which the concept of nature is referring. According to the
presentation in Being and Time, the Vorhanden is not identical to entities, but merely
one way in which entities may become manifest, one mode of the being of entities.
But here Heidegger identifies nature with the Vorhandensein, and then explains that
innerworldliness is only a possible determination of its mode of being: “Innerworldli-
ness belongs to the being of the extant, nature, [Sein des Vorhandenen, der Natur] not
as a determination of its being, but as a possible determination.”40 One should wonder
about the relationship between these four notions: Natur, Vorhandensein, Seienden,
and Innerweltlichkeit (Nature, objective presence, entities, and innerworldliness). Is
nature the being of innerworldly Vorhandensein? Or is it the being of innerworldly
entities? Are all entities innerworldly? Or is Vorhandensein a determination only of
innerworldly entities that have been objectified? Heidegger is not consistent enough
with the terminology to make such distinctions rigidly. More importantly, the problem
that he is trying to identify is precisely the way in which this worldly existence of enti-
ties is not necessary to their constitution, for they may exist “outside” or independent
of world: “Being within the world devolves upon this being, nature, [Innerweltlich-
keit fällt diesem Seienden, der Natur,] solely when it is uncovered as a being. Being
within the world does not have to devolve upon nature as a determination.”41 While
being-in-the-world is a necessary component of Dasein, and there can be no Dasein
without world and vice-versa, it is not so with these natural entities.
It is not clear Heidegger’s use of nature here modifies the being of entities (Seien-
den) or of the Vorhanden, as when he describes “innerworldliness [Innerweltlichkeit]
as a possible but not necessary determination of extant entities [des Vorhandenen].”42
But methodologically, it makes quite a bit of difference whether this notion of
Nature is identified with the Vorhanden or with entities independent of categorical
determination. Heidegger could have reserved the term “Vorhanden” to the strictly
innerworldly existence of entities once they have been divested of meaning by the
de-worlding process of the cognitive gaze, and the term “nature” to their non-worldly
or pre-worldly existence. This could lead to a consistent claim that the Vorhanden
only exists when Dasein exists since it is a modification of the Zuhanden and there-
fore of the process of de-worlding, while Nature exists without Dasein. But this is
not the case in the texts themselves. Take, for example, Heidegger’s description of
a natural event as the sudden irruption of a new entity into worldliness:

All beings [Seiende] whose mode of being is unlike Dasein must be understood as
unmeaningful, as essentially bare of meaning as such. . . . Objectively present things
encountered in Dasein can, so to speak, run against its being, for example, events of
nature [Naturereignisse] which break in on us and destroy us.43

am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), p. 240. Hereafter cited as BPP and GPP respectively. Translation
modified for innerweltlich and Innerweltlichkeit in all of the citations to this text.
39
BPP 169; GPP 240.
40
BPP 168; GPP 240.
41
BPP 168; GPP 240.
42
BPP 168; GPP 240.
43
BT 142; SZ 152.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 505

Heidegger is here thinking of a sudden event that shatters the meaningful by enter-
ing from a space outside of our meaningful realm, as in an asteroid that hits the
earth prior to any modern astronomical knowledge and is therefore encountered as
a radical rupture of our normal interpretation of reality. But notice how Heidegger
shifts from describing this natural event as that of an entity unlike Dasein and as
the objectively present. It is clearly the case that the event could be thematized and
explained, say, through our current knowledge of astronomy, such that it makes
sense to say that the asteroid existed prior to its world-entry, but it is dubious that
its existence is a modification of the Zuhanden. But since Vorhandensein is doing
the work for the being of the entity prior to its meaningfulness and for scientific
account of the entity as objectively present, the two claims are collapsed.
The ambiguity surrounding the innerworldliness of the Vorhanden is also the
reason why the famous passage on world-entry (Welteingang) in Heidegger’s 1928
seminar The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic is so difficult to interpret consis-
tently.44 Similar to the natural events that come from an unmeaningful background
to break into the world of meaning, Heidegger needs to articulate how entities come
into the world. Heidegger begins his description with the suggestion that entities
and extant things are one and the same thing: “At any rate, beings (extant things)
[Seiendes (Vorhandenes)] could never get encountered had they not the opportu-
nity to enter a world.”45 One could attempt to make this consistent, once again, by
claiming that Heidegger is not speaking of entities independent of their mode of
encounter, of entities in the sense of nature. Perhaps his identification of entities with
the Vorhanden is meant to suggest the natural-scientific description of innerworldly
beings. Yet he continues:

Innerworldliness is accordingly not an extant property of extant things [Vorhandenden]

in themselves. Extant things are beings as the kind of things they are [Das Vorhandene ist
das Seiende als welches und was es ist], even if they do not become innerworldly, even if
world-entry does not happen to them and there is no occasion for it at all.46

To claim that the Vorhanden can be what it is independent of its entry-into-world,

independent of Dasein, and of the process of unworlding, is to undercut the entire
articulation of the Vorhanden as a derivative modification of the Zuhanden. If the
Vorhanden can exist independently of Dasein and of World but the Zuhanden cannot,
it is hard to see how the former could be a founded mode of the latter. As we have
seen, the textual oscillation of the terminology makes it difficult to decide the way
in which Heidegger can be called a realist or a transcendental idealist.

44
The problem of Welteingangs is carefully discussed and interpreted by David Cerbone, “World, World-
Entry, and Realism in Early Heidegger,” Inquiry 38 (1995): 401–21.
45
Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington IN:
Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), p. 194; Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz.
Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 26 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1978), p. 250. Hereafter cited as MFL/MAL.
Translation modified for innerweltlich and Innerweltlichkeit in all of the citations to this text.
46
MFL 194; MAL, 251.
506 RAONI PADUI

A HISTORICAL INTERLUDE ON THE ORIGINS OF “OBJECTIVITY”

If Heidegger’s position on the independence of entities cannot be made consistent

with a transcendental-phenomenological position in a purely textual manner, I want
to propose that a historical contextualization of a problem surrounding the notion
of objectivity may help explain this textual ambiguity. One dominant notion of
objectivity is intimately related to truth, validity, and meaning, and from within the
post-Kantian transcendental tradition it cannot be coherently disentangled from
transcendental subjectivity. There is, however, another lineage of the concept of
objectivity, one that is not necessarily connected to transcendental validity, and it
is this second one that gives rise to the ontic realism that one finds in Heidegger.
Objectivity can mean radically different things, and these meanings arise from the
complexity of its history. As Lorraine Daston exclaims, the notion of objectivity
is “hopelessly but revealingly confused.”47 A concept that originated in medieval
philosophy in order to denote the object as it exists in the mind regardless of its
independent existence has come to mean precisely the opposite, namely, what ex-
ists independent of subjective distortions. This shift happens around the time of
German Idealism, even though the problems to which it is responding had been
around since early modernity.48 The experimental method itself, in its attempt to
ascertain objectivity by means of a controlled but factual event, is one occasion for
the origination of this division.
For example, as Shapin and Schaffer demonstrate in Leviathan and the Air-Pump,
historically what was at stake in the argument between Hobbes and Boyle was not
simply the rehashing of the vacuist-plenist debate or the question of the physical
integrity of the air pump.49 Rather, the real debate had to do more with the nature
of philosophical demonstration, and whether or not an experimental demonstra-
tion could count as scientific knowledge. Hobbes defends the claim that the factual
knowledge witnessed through Boyle’s experiment was simply not philosophical or
scientific, and thus not properly objective,50 which would have already been clear
from chapter nine of his Leviathan. There Hobbes differentiates between historical
knowledge that treats of facts (and can be divided into natural history and civil his-
tory), and truly scientific or philosophical knowledge:

There are of knowledge two kinds, whereof one is knowledge of fact, the other knowledge
of the consequence of one affirmation to another. The former is nothing else but sense
and memory, and is absolute knowledge, as when we see a fact doing, or remember it
done; and this is the knowledge required in a witness. The latter is called science, and is
conditional, as when we know that if the figure shown be a circle, then any straight line

47
Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597.
48
See Galileo’s famous account of heat in terms that already distinguish between what came to be called
primary and secondary qualities by Locke in his 1623 work The Assayer, as printed in The Essential Galileo,
ed. and trans. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 2008), pp. 185–89.
49
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental
Life (Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), p. 19.
50
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 102.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 507

through the center shall divide it into two equal parts. And this is the knowledge required
in a philosopher, that is to say, of him that pretends to reasoning.51

The former type of objectivity, if it deserved the name of objectivity at all, is simply
the factual singularity of an event. While absolute, it could only be unreliably known
because of the nature of witnessing. While experiments may be examples of events
that are mind-independent and thus in one sense “objective,” Hobbes denies that
these new experimental demonstrations can be properly called scientific.
It is from within this philosophical tradition of contesting the bare factual validity
of the experiment (despite, of course, the obvious and radical differences between
Hobbes and Kant) that the Kantian notion of objectivity as objective validity (ob-
jektive Gültigkeit) arises. Kant maintains a necessary space for the philosopher or
reflective scientist that is distinct from the empirical objectivity derived from ex-
perimentation. Although the debates between primary and secondary qualities and
about the nature of demonstration had been developing throughout the early modern
period, scholars have shown that the strict division between philosophical objectivity
and empirical objectivity can be traced back to Kant. As Michael Friedman explains:

Kant’s idea of a “transcendental philosophy” is the historical source for the differentia-
tion between philosophy and the special sciences that has dominated the modern period.
Philosophy, for Kant, no longer had a characteristic first-level subject matter or object of
its own . . . but functioned rather at a second or meta-level to describe what Kant called
the conditions of possibility of first-level scientific knowledge.52

Thus the transcendental comes to refer to a domain of presuppositions upon which

the empirical natural sciences depend. And there are important ways in which
Heidegger’s division between the ontological and the ontic repeats the distinction
that it inherits from the Kantian tradition. For Heidegger, the ontological questions
developed within fundamental ontology are more originary than and foundational
for ontic questions within the positive sciences:

The question of being thus aims at an a priori condition of the possibility not only of the
sciences that investigate beings of such and such a type—and are thereby involved in an
understanding of being; but it aims also at the condition of the possibility of the ontolo-
gies that precede the ontic sciences and found them.53

As we will see, however, the priority that Heidegger gives to phenomenological

ontology, and especially to the investigation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world as a
condition of possibility for the scientific development of specific positive sciences,
is not identical to the priority found in the transcendental tradition.54

51
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 60.
52
Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason (Stanford CA: CSLI Publications, 2001), p. 25.
53
BT 9, SZ 11.
54
Cf. Reiner Schürmann’s distinction between fundamental ontology and foundational ontology in his
“Heidegger’s Being and Time” in On Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Steven Levine (London UK: Rout-
ledge, 2008), p. 74.
508 RAONI PADUI

As the experimental program further dominated the natural sciences, the image
of objectivity as validity was constantly being eroded by the notion of the objec-
tive defended by Boyle against Hobbes. As Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston
demonstrate,55 the objectivity of universal properties and essences gradually gave way
in the nineteenth century to an image of mechanical objectivity. While the former
required a stripping away of all arbitrary and contingent aspects and a reduction to
the archetypal features shared by all specimens, the latter involved a reproduction of
the singular object under investigation, warts and all. Through a historical investiga-
tion of the images in atlases produced by anatomists, naturalists, and other natural
scientists of the modern period, Galison and Daston demonstrate how this dramatic
change in the notion of objectivity occurred somewhere around the early or middle
of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, objectivity primarily and paradigmatically
meant what they call “truth-to-nature,” where nature is understood as the archetype
or essence of an entity rather than the individual specimen:

What the image represented, or ought to represent, was not the actual individual speci-
men before them but an idealized, perfected, or at least characteristic exemplar of a
species or other natural kind. . . . They defended the realism—the “truth-to-nature”—of
underlying types and regularities against the naturalism of the individual object, with all
its misleading idiosyncrasies.56

With the introduction of photography and several other methods of reproduction that
aimed at automatism in order to remove or minimize human intervention, objectivity
came to be understood as pertaining to the actual individual specimen rather than its
repeatable and generalizable archetype, much to the chagrin of philosophers who
still wished to transcendentally ground empirical science.57
What emerges from this history is two different images of objectivity, that, al-
though possibly compatible, do not necessarily have the same lineage or a necessary
connection. Two senses of objectivity can arise out of two very different attempts
to secure the objective against subjective distortions. We can begin with the follow-
ing general claim, which encompasses several senses of objectivity in the Kantian
transcendental paradigm: “something is objective if it holds or is valid or is true
independent of merely subjective contributions.” The “merely” is important here, for
differences will arise precisely on whether or not objectivity is to be found within the
universal forms of subjectivity or by systematically removing or neutralizing sub-
jectivity. One strategy or path towards objectivity attempts to differentiate between
the merely subjective (understood as the empirical subject with its desires, feelings,
opinions, confusions, and ideologies) and the transcendentally inter-subjective,
which actually grounds universality and validity. On this reading, objectivity means
that which is structurally valid for every subject but is not necessarily independent
of subjectivity, and the paradigmatic example is often mathematical, as in the

55
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York NY: Zone Books, 2007).
56
Ibid., p. 42.
57
This is not to say that the notion of Kantian objectivity disappeared; rather, it remained influential in a
long legacy of thinking of the objective, as shown by Daston and Galison, Objectivity, pp. 205–16.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 509

claim: “it is objectively true that any triangle will have angles that add up to two
right angles.”58 A different sense of objectivity arises, however, if one understands
it as that which is independent of subjectivity in general, regardless of whether this
subjectivity is empirical or transcendental. In saying: “it is an objective fact that it
is currently raining outside my house,” one is claiming that it is the case, regardless
of what anyone thinks—that is, that it happens independently of being thought.
This was the type of factual knowledge that Hobbes called absolute, but for which
he did not have high scientific hopes (but little did he know how much mechanical
innovations would change the problem of witnessing).
Sometimes these two senses of objectivity are combined into one, as in classical
versions of metaphysical realism. Hilary Putnam describes them in this way:

On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects.
There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is.” Truth in-
volves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external
things and sets of things.59

Here objectivity, the notion that the world is composed of a totality of mind-
independent objects, is directly linked to the possibility of one true description of
this world and to a correspondence notion of truth. But the first ingredient of this
realism, the notion of mind-independence, does not necessitate these other claims.
Here, for example, is Nicholas Rescher describing the very same metaphysical re-
alism, without, however, presupposing an absolute description or correspondence
theory of truth:

The issue of objectivity in the sense of mind-independence is pivotal for a viable realism.
A fact is objective in this mode if it obtains thought-independently—if any change merely
in what is thought by the world’s intelligences would leave it unaffected.60

That is, what we may today call “metaphysical realism” is a complex historical
product of many different and often separable claims. Take for example, the way
Ian Hacking separates realism about entities from realism about theories, the first
referring to questions such as “Do quarks exist?” and the second to questions like
“Is quantum mechanics true?”61 As he further shows, these realisms admit of dif-
ferent answers depending on whether one thinks of science as primarily in the
epistemological business of representing reality or in the experimental business
of producing effects and intervening on reality.62 This is, in part, a continuation

58
Cf. Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcen-
dental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston IL:
Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 353–78.
59
Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), p. 49.
60
Nicholas Rescher, Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Oxford UK:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 102.
61
Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science
(Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 27–29.
62
Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening, pp. 144–46.
510 RAONI PADUI

of the debate that Boyle and Hobbes had about the status of objectivity, a debate
from which we inherit distinct and sometimes conflicting ideas of what it means
for something to exist independently of my taking it to be so, independently of my
knowings and doings.
Analogous to this distinction between an objectivity that obtains because it is
transcendentally valid and objectivity due to independence from human theoreti-
cal projections or practical manipulations, is a division within Heidegger that gets
articulated at the level of the ontological difference. There is a type of objectivity
that pertains to the ontological dimension. Here Heidegger is with the philosophers
(Hobbes, Kant, and Husserl) against the natural scientist’s factum brutum. Without
Dasein as a necessary participant in the domain of disclosure and truth called World,
there is no truth or validity. But there is also a notion of objectivity that pertains to the
ontic dimension. Here Heidegger agrees with the experimental tradition of science
on maintaining unequivocally the independent existence of entities. The ontological
level is Dasein-dependent but the ontic is Dasein-independent. The transcendental
tradition has familiarly claimed that the second type of objectivity, the ontic kind,
is only comprehensible on the basis of the first. Can Heidegger coherently maintain
the independence of these two kinds of objectivity, without making one subservient
to or grounded upon the other?

CONCLUSION: NEO-KANTIANISM AND THE HIATUS IRRATIONALIS

In order to understand fully the ambiguity in Heidegger’s text between the

Dasein-dependence of truth, meaning, and any understanding of being and the
Dasein-independence of the existence of entities it is important to keep in mind the
historical backdrop of this ambiguity. These issues surrounding objectivity played a
significant role in the Neo-Kantian debates about the proper differentiation between
the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften that were taking place dur-
ing Heidegger’s formative years as a young philosopher. From Dilthey’s distinction
between the psychic and the physical to Windelband’s distinction between nomo-
thetic and idiographic scientific tendencies, Heidegger’s intellectual development
took place at a time of serious engagement with the question how it is that scientific
universalizing objectivity could relate to the singularity of a historical individual.63
While Heidegger will repeatedly criticize his former Doktorvater Heinrich Rickert
once he fully embraces Husserlian phenomenology in the twenties, it is hard to deny
that some of these issues, especially under the influence of Emil Lask,64 became
determinative for his thinking. So, while it is probably true that there are Kantian
influences in Heidegger’s attempt to think of the Vorhanden or occurent objective
63
On Heidegger and Dilthey, see especially Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of
Historicism (Ithaca NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995); on the different understanding of these distinctions in
Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, and Lask, see Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford
UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).
64
On Lask’s influence on Heidegger, see especially Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger—Lask—Fichte” in
Heidegger, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism, ed. Tom Rockmore (New York NY: Humanity Books,
2000), and Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental
Phenomenology, especially pp. 76–92.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 511

entities, these should not be understood as straightforwardly Kantian but as filtered

through the lens of the Baden or Southwest school of neo-Kantianism. Despite his
claims to the contrary, Heidegger learned from Rickert and Lask to think in terms of
a division between the world of truth and meaning and the non-rational and singular
world of entities, in themselves bare of meaning or significance.
In Rickert’s attempt to follow Windelband and differentiate between concept-
formation in the natural and historical sciences, he argues that there are two logical
directions towards which one can take any empirical reality: if one wants to un-
derstand that which is general and universal within it, the concept-formation will
be natural-scientific. But if one wants to understand the individuality of the entity,
then one is dealing with it historically. According to Rickert the natural sciences
do not tend to treat individuals qua individuals, but rather to understand the general
properties and attributes this individual shares by being a certain kind of entity.
Therefore, in the investigation of the individual “Heidegger” by natural science,
what matters is that he is a human, a mammal, an animal, and so on, while for the
historical investigation it matters that he was born on such a unique date, joined
the Nazi party at this particular moment, and so on. This leads Rickert to claim
that empirical reality becomes a limit-concept and impasse to the universalizing
tendencies of the natural sciences: “Therefore, it is incontestable that empirical
reality—just as it exists, individual and perceptual—cannot be incorporated into
any system of concepts in natural science.”65 Rickert concludes by setting up a form
of unbridgeable chasm between the sphere of natural-scientific knowledge and the
uniquely existing individual: “Like the content of every concept of natural science,
the content of a nomological concept is general. The content of all empirical reality,
on the other hand, is individual. This gap can never be bridged, for the meaning of
knowledge of the real as nature rests directly on it.”66 However, for Rickert even
the individuality of empirical reality is itself selected and determined by interests
and values, and therefore the individual is not itself the inaccessible “real.” Echo-
ing and criticizing Hegel, he claims that the real itself is therefore the irrational:
“Reality itself, the infinite manifold of which scorns every conception, can at best
be called “irrational,” and even this designation could only be applied to it only on
the grounds that it resists every conception.”67 Rickert sees reality as an infinite and
heterogeneous continuum, which can either be made homogeneous by the univer-
salizing tendencies of natural science (in which case the heterogeneous character
is lost), or made into a discrete individual (which preserves the heterogeneity but
annihilates its continuous and infinite character). This is a fact the young Heidegger
was well aware of, as is evident from his lectures on Neo-Kantianism in 1919:
“There is nothing absolutely homogenous; everything is different, everything real
is heterogeneous. In sum, reality is a heterogeneous continuum. This togetherness

65
Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge
UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 41. A translation of Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Beg-
riffsbildung.
66
Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation, p. 40.
67
Ibid., p. 52.
512 RAONI PADUI

of continuity and alterity gives reality that character of irrationality before which
the concept is quite powerless.”68
It is Rickert’s student Emil Lask who further radicalizes this gap between reality
and our grasping of it. He designates it with a term borrowed from Fichte’s late
philosophy: the hiatus irrationalis. In the process of lamenting his untimely death
in the First World War, Heidegger speaks of: “Emil Lask, to whose investigations I
personally owe very much.”69 One of Lask’s achievements in his short philosophi-
cal career was to further articulate the problem of irrationality found in Rickert
by criticizing certain psychological and overly epistemological formulations and
radicalizing the ontological elements of the heterogeneity between concepts and
reality.70 For Lask, the realm of validity becomes the sphere of non-being, which is
set against an inscrutable sphere of irrational being. In typical Kantian manner, he
differentiates between the form of experience in which truth, meaning, and validity
holds, and a matter of experience in which entities exist but are bare of meaning as
such. Rickert had insisted in making of this gap a strictly epistemological one. Real-
ity is not irrational in itself. It is only irrational relative to our attempts to cognize
and conceptualize it.71 But Lask is not satisfied to leave it at this epistemological
dimension, which could eventually explain our inability to grasp reality through
some type of faculty-psychology (Lask had been reading Husserl’s critique of
psychologism). His attempt to ontologize the irrational hiatus between our concep-
tion of the world and the entities within it must have left a significant mark on the
philosophical imagination of the young Heidegger.72
It is undeniable that throughout Being and Time Heidegger is criticizing the idea
that the world is a collection of facts “out there” that our consciousness distorts
through some subjective imposition. Despite this fact, I want to argue that there
is some remnant of Neo-Kantianism in Heidegger’s distinction between the onto-
logical and the ontic. Specifically, the gap between our conception of reality and
something like “reality itself” is reproduced at a different register, as mediated
through an ontologization of its epistemological version. That is, it is not the case
that reality is “out there” and we are unable to grasp it due to some incapacity of
the ways in which our consciousness subsumes empirical data into universalizing
concepts, but rather that there is something inherently irrational in the entities
themselves. Or, if one wants to be more careful about the notion of irrationality,
there is something inherently meaningless and nonsensical about entities. This is
most evident in Heidegger’s insistence that entities unlike Dasein (leaving out the
difficult problem of life and animality for the time being) are worldless (weltlos)
in nature. The vast majority of uses of the adjective “weltlos” in Being and Time

68
Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (New York NY: Continuum,
2008), pp. 128–29; Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA, Bd. 56/57 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann,
1987), p. 171.
69
Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 137; Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 180.
70
Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre: Eine Studie über den Herrschaftsbereich
der logischen Form (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr, 1993).
71
Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation, p. 52.
72
Cf. Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie, p. 31.
HEIDEGGER ON THE NONSENSE OF OBJECTS 513

refer to the inappropriate characterization of Dasein as a “worldless” subject and

to the critique of Cartesian abstract subjectivity; however, Heidegger does admit
at one moment that there are entities that are appropriately characterized as world-
less in themselves: “Two beings that are objectively present within the world and
are, moreover, worldless in themselves [an ihnen selbst weltlos sind], can never
‘touch’ each other.”73 While characterizing Dasein in such a way is tantamount to a
category-mistake, this is not so with entities with a different mode of being—stones
and fossils, lecterns, and hammers. These objects meet the activity of sense-bestowal
with a chilly indifference. They are the way they are, independent of the ways in
which we grasp them, conceptualize them, or make them meaningful. This is an ontic
form of objecthood that should not be immediately identified with an ontological
question of objectification that happens at the level of theoretical knowledge and
scientific manipulation. These entities are, for the most part, worldless in themselves.
The unworlding happens to the hammer as hammer, and not to the being itself.74
From this perspective one can make sense of how Heidegger can claim that real-
ity is dependent on an understanding of Being and thus on Dasein, but that “the
Real” is not. There is a difference here between the meaningful being-in-the-world
of Dasein, and all the entities called innerworldly, and the bare senselessness of
entities outside that articulated space of meaning. There is a distinction between
that which is meaningful or meaningless within the realm of the innerworldly, and
that which is neither meaningful nor meaningless, but without meaning:

Only Dasein “has” meaning in that the disclosedness of being-in-the-world can be

“fulfilled” through the beings discoverable in it. Thus only Dasein can be meaningful or
meaningless [Nur Dasein kann daher sinnvoll oder sinnlos sein.] This means that its own
being and the beings disclosed with that being can be appropriated in understanding or
they can be confined to incomprehensibility.75

There are, however, two types of negation here: one that renders something mean-
ingless in relation to the meaningful (this Heidegger calls the sinnlos), and another
that is without any sense, purely irrational in its entity-character. Heidegger calls
this the un- or non-meaningful (Unsinnig), or more literally, nonsense:

All being whose mode of being is unlike Dasein must be understood as unmeaningful,
as essentially bare of meaning as such [als unsinniges, des Sinnes überhaupt wesenhaft

73
BT 52; SZ 55. On the worldless character of some entities such as stones, see Martin Heidegger, The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington IN: Indiana Univ. Press,
1995), p. 177; Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30
(Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1983), p. 263.
74
When Heidegger speaks of the de- or un-worlding process, he is speaking about a transformation or a
change-over (Umschlag) in the understanding of the being of an entity: “The understanding of being guiding
the heedful association with innerworldly beings has been transformed” (BT 330; SZ 361). Whereas the
worldless character of entities unlike Dasein is something that does not get transformed by our interpreta-
tion of them. If that is the case, then both ready-to-hand and present-at-hand entities are, in themselves,
worldless at this level.
75
Heidegger, BT 142; SZ 151.
514 RAONI PADUI

bares begriffen]. ‘Unmeaningful’ does not mean here a value judgment [keine Wertung],
but expresses an ontological determination.76

The reference here to value (Wert) should not be understood merely as Heidegger
cautioning his readers against understanding the unmeaningful character of entities
as a denigrating moral evaluation (although it is that, too), but perhaps as a direct
reference to the philosophy of value of Windelband, Rickert, and Lask. Heidegger
is claiming that the gap between the meaningful and unmeaningful, despite being
structurally and conceptually similar to the distinction between the normative realm
of value and the realm of empirical reality or existence, should be understood onto-
logically. Thus the worldlessness of the objectively present is not so merely in relation
to the world, but as a constitutive determination of their existence. Only because
these entities are bare of meaning as such can they move in and out of world: “And
only what is unmeaningful can be absurd [Und nur das Unsinnige kann widersin-
nig sein]. Objectively present things encountered in Dasein can, so to speak, run
against its being, for example, events of nature that break in on us and destroy us.”77
While that which is contrary to sense or senseless (widersinnig, sinnlos) is always
understood to be so with reference to sense, and thus to Dasein’s understanding of
being as a condition of possible sense, some entities are themselves nonsensical.
They are this in their individual, singular, “objective” character, independent of the
interpretations, meanings, and articulations that they may take on once they enter
the space of sense, the world. While we have seen that Heidegger is not altogether
clear or consistent on the question of how to articulate the relationship between their
Vorhanden, objectively present innerworldly character and their objective character
independent of world (weltlos), this is a position that is both historically motivated
and conceptually coherent. In other words, something can be singularly the case,
objectively, even though we cannot properly know that it, objectively, is the case.
This is another way of saying that some entities can be radically without ground,
without why, without sense.

76
Heidegger, BT 142; SZ 152.
77
BT 142; SZ 152.